Jonathan Kay: How the Taliban ends

In March, 2004, Israeli soldiers manning the Hawara checkpoint near Nablus witnessed a shocking site: An adolescent Palestinian boy named Abdu lifted up his shirt to reveal a large suicide vest. Everyone braced for an explosion. But instead, the boy froze, and declared to the Israelis that he didn’t want to blow himself up.

Abdu (who later turned out to have “developmental problems,” according to his parents) kneeled on the ground and appeared terrified. He removed the vest and then was taken into Israeli custody. The entire pathetic spectacle was captured on video. His picture appeared on the front page of the next day’s Israeli newspapers, with headlines such as “I wanted virgins in paradise.”

In the long campaign to defeat and discredit Palestinian terrorism, this was a decisive moment. The fact that the terrorists would use a mentally disabled boy as their bomber showed that they’d become desperate for recruits. Worse, from their own propaganda perspective, it showed that they would resort to any tactic — even killing a Palestinian child — to further their campaign.

I thought of Abdu this week when I saw news that an eight-year-old Afghan girl had been tricked into blowing herself up near a police station in Uruzgan Province. (She died, but no one else was hurt.) The case is not isolated: In Pakistan, terrorists recently strapped a suicide vest to a nine-year-old girl they’d abducted and drugged (the girl was saved and returned to her family). Neither plot is likely to have originated with the Taliban itself, which tries to avoid using children. But both incidents will help discredit the instrument of terrorism upon which the Taliban rely.

The killing of Osama bin Laden in May captivated the world’s attention, and some Western leaders have cited the al-Qaeda leader’s death as evidence that we can draw down troops in the region. But the death of that eight-year-old girl likely will do as much to bring about the jihadis’ defeat than any American commando raid or battlefield victory.

In a fascinating new book, How Terrorism Ends, U.S. National War College professor Audrey Kurth Cronin catalogues the many different ways in which terrorist groups such as the Taliban and al-Qaeda collapse. Simply killing or capturing the leader, she emphasizes, can only work in cases where the group operates as a rigid top-down hierarchy (such as Peru’s Shining Path or Turkey’s PKK). Nor do broad military campaigns usually work — because exterminating an entire terrorist group typically requires more brutal methods than democratic governments feel comfortable using. (There are exceptions, however, as Sri Lanka’s brutal victory over the Tamil Tigers attests.)

In the case of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, a more promising strategy comes under the heading that Cronin describes as “Targeting errors and backlash” — an abstract label that described the horror and revulsion that locals feel when terrorists use brainwashed recruits, and even children, to engage in mass slaughter. Terrorist groups generally are effective at building popular support when they limit their targets to occupying soldiers or their allied local police assets. But when those military and police targets become hardened, as has happened in Afghanistan thanks to the presence of NATO soldiers, the terrorists go after softer targets. And that’s when the backlash starts.

Cronin lists plenty of precedents in the “targeting errors and backlash” category: The Real Irish Republican Army, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine/General Command, Quebec’s own FLQ, the Sikh separatists who bombed Air India Flight 182, Shamil Basayev’s Chechen terrorist group (which was responsible for the Beslan school hostage crisis in North Ossetia, one of the most unconscionable single terrorism-related incidents in modern history), Spain’s ETA, the Red Brigades, and Egypt’s al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya (responsible for the Luxor Massacre of 1997, among other bloody attacks). In all of these cases, the terrorists used methods that went far beyond the tolerance of the local population on whose behalf they professed to be fighting. The resulting popular backlash either destroyed the group outright, or served to legitimize the more aggressive methods used successfully by the state.

In the case of modern Muslim terrorist groups, the red line is very clear: Local populations turn against terrorism when it results in the death of innocent Muslims. That’s why victims such as the eight-year-old girl killed in Uruzgan resonate so strongly, and negatively, against the terrorists’ cause.

In the second-to-last chapter of How Terrorism Ends, Cronin supplies an interesting parallel between the war against terrorism in central Asia and the more successful campaign in Iraq.

In 2005, at a time when it appeared that Iraq might be descending into an all-out civil war, the tribes of western Iraq suddenly began to turn against al-Qaeda and its local proxies. “Their brutal methods, such as assassinations of opponents, enforced suicide bombings, forced marriages and imposition of sharia law, repelled Iraqi Sunnis,” Cronin writes. The result was bloody internecine fighting among jihadis, some of whom followed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s strategy of slaughtering fellow Muslims (and especially Shiites) in a bid to sow chaos, while others adhered to a well-publicized directive from al-Qaeda’s then-deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, imploring an end to Muslim-on-Muslim bloodshed.

The campaign against terrorists in Afghanistan is more complicated than the situation in Iraq for a few reasons. First, the Taliban get support from a foreign power (Pakistan) in a way that Iraqi terrorists never did. Second, the Taliban campaign is wrapped up in a larger, generations-old struggle to unify Pashtuns on both sides of the border into a greater Pahstunistan. And third, the forbidding terrain of the Hindu Kush region makes it difficult for NATO to launch the sort of conventional military campaigns that resulted in, say, the clearing of Iraq’s Anbar province. But in broad strokes, the end of the Taliban and al-Qaeda likely will look like the end of Iraq’s terrorist groups: a building backlash caused by indiscriminate attacks against Muslim civilians.

What does this mean for NATO nations, including Canada, which are reducing their troop strength in Afghanistan?

First, it means that we should stop treating every terrorist attack against Afghan civilians — such as the truck bomb that exploded near a maternity hospital in Logar province on Sunday — as a military failure in the war on terrorism. These attacks are humanitarian tragedies, but history shows that their cumulative military effect is to weaken the enemy, not strengthen him. The Taliban themselves know this, which is why they desperately try to disavow responsibility when an attack like this occurs.

Second, it means that NATO military commanders have been correct to adopt a military strategy that minimizes civilian casualties. It does us little good for the Taliban to be regarded as murderers if the same label can be credibly attached to us.

Third, it means that we have to carefully consider whether we should withdraw from Afghanistan. Cronin argues convincingly in her book that democratic countries cannot defeat terrorist groups through strictly military strategies. But one thing that a strong military presence can do is force terrorists to avoid the most politically appealing targets — legislature buildings, military outposts, presidential convoys, major commercial hubs, airports — which have been hardened by our troops. Once those troops are gone, these are the targets that the Taliban will go back to targeting.

The result of this will be that a terrorist group that had been destroying its reputation and local support base with indiscriminate attacks will once again be able to get back into the more reputable business of real insurgency. Our best strategy, I would argue, would be to stick around and watch the Taliban self-destruct.

National Postjkay@nationalpost.com

— Jonathan Kay is Managing Editor for Comment at the National Post, and a fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C.

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